Paterson (Revised Edition) by William Carlos Williams

clear      .
    He fled pursued by the roar.
    Seventy-five of the world’s leading scholars, poets and philosophers gathered at Princeton last week     .     .     .
    Faitoute ground his heel
    hard down on the stone:
    Sunny today, with the highest temperature near 80 degrees; moderate southerly winds. Partly cloudy and continued warm tomorrow, with moderate southerly winds.
    Her belly     .     her belly is like
    a cloud     .     a cloud
    at evening     .
    His mind would reawaken:
    He Me with my pants, coat and vest still on!
    She And me still in my galoshes!
    —the descent follows the ascent—to wisdom
    as to despair.
    A man is under the crassest necessity
    to break down the pinnacles of his moods
    fearlessly   —
    to the bases; base! to the screaming dregs,
    to have known the clean air     .
    From that base, unabashed, to regain
    the sun kissed summits of love!
    —obscurely
    in to scribble     .     and a war won!
    —saying over to himself a song written
    previously     .     inclines to believe
    he sees, in the structure, something
    of interest:
    On this most voluptuous night of the year
    the term of the moon is yellow with no light
    the air’s soft, the night bird has
    only one note, the cherry tree in bloom
    makes a blur on the woods, its perfume
    no more than half guessed moves in the mind.
    No insect is yet awake, leaves are few.
    In the arching trees there is no sleep.
    The blood is still and indifferent, the face
    does not ache nor sweat soil nor the
    mouth thirst.     Now love might enjoy its play
    and nothing disturb the full octave of its run.
    Her belly     .     her belly is like a white cloud     .     a
    white cloud at evening     .     before the shuddering night!
    My attitude toward woman’s wretched position in society and my ideas about all the changes necessary there, were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for
literature?
That my particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterned standardized feminine feelings, enabled me to do some passably good work with
poetry
—all that was fine, wasn’t it—something for you to sit up and take notice of! And you saw in one of my first letters to you (the one you had wanted to make use of, then, in the Introduction to your Paterson) an indication that my thoughts were to be taken seriously, because that too could be turned by you into literature, as something disconnected from life.
    But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the
very same
attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as
literature
—that was an entirely different matter, wasn’t it? No longer admirable, but, on the contrary, deplorable, annoying, stupid, or in some other way unpardonable; because those very ideas and feelings which make one a writer with some kind of new vision, are often the
very same ones
which, in living itself, make one clumsy, awkward, absurd, ungrateful, confidential where most people are reticent, and reticent where one should be confidential, and which cause one, all too often, to step on the toes of other people’s sensitive egos as a result of one’s stumbling earnestness or honesty carried too far. And that they
are
the very same ones—that’s important, something to be remembered at all times, especially by writers like yourself who are so sheltered from life in the raw by the glass-walled conditions of their own safe lives.
    Only
my writing (when I write) is myself: only that is the real me in any essential way. Not because I bring to literature and to life two different inconsistent sets of values, as you do. No,
I
don’t do that; and I feel that when anyone does do it, literature is turned into just so much intellectual excrement fit for the same stinking hole as any other kind.
    But in writing (as in all forms of creative art) one derives one’s